I love a good frittata and over the years I relied on them for brunch menus when I wasn’t feeling creative. This frittata I made to use up a nice haul of pheasant back / dryad saddle mushrooms one year, inspired by an herby, slightly spicy omelet I saw French Chef Pierre Gagnierre make. Pheasant…
Dryad Saddle | Pheasant Back | Cerioporus squamosus
It's important to get dryad saddle mushrooms when they're young as they get tough quickly.
Dryad saddle or pheasant back mushrooms are a very common spring mushroom that take a little technique to get right. They have a special flavor too, and if you're a mushroom enthusiast like me, you'll love them. To get the hang of cooking and preparing them down, refer to my basic guide to dryad saddles. If you have some to cook, try them in ramen, pickles, or as a simple side dish.
Rainbow Trout with Fiddleheads and Pheasant Backs
Last week we had a couple over for dinner and the woman, a friend of my girlfriend I’d met many times before, was, unbeknownst to me, a fly-fishing apex predator. I still have trouble catching anything but rocks with my rod, but she showed up with an entire cooler filled with 8 whole brook trout,…
Pheasant Back-Spring Vegetable Soup
Here’s a great recipe to celebrate some of the young growing plants of spring: a simple, brothy soup made from green garlic or wild onions, pheasant back mushrooms, a spring shoot/vegetable of your choice (I used fiddleheads and elm samaras) wild rice or another grain, and a little meat broth or whatever you have on…
White Wine Pheasant Backs
My old chef and I were out morel hunting in a new spot in Wisconsin this week, and, unfortunately, we got skunked. Thankfully there were a few old-timers on the same patch of land who hunt it every year who came up empty handed too, so I didn’t feel too bad. As is pretty common…
Pheasant Back Fermented Shoyu
Prime pheasant back / dryad saddle season is usually about over after the spring chicken of the woods pop, but just because they’re big and tough as nails doesn’t mean you can’t do anything with them, and pheasant back shoyu is a great example, especially if you like edible science projects. Shoyu and it’s cousin…
Meatball Stew with Pheasant Backs and Campion
Meatball stew with pheasant back mushrooms and campion is a dish I came up with after I’d been reading about campion, and how it, and it’s relatives (mostly Silene vulgaris and Silene inflata) are used widely in Mediterranean cooking. The recipe itself is a sort of hodge-podge of different ingredients you might see in European…
Braised Burdock and Wild Mushrooms
Ever since I figured out a reasonably efficient way to dig burdock roots, I’ve been eating it every which way. Kinpira was my real breakthrough. Sure, I opened up a restaurant featuring burdock as a local ingredient, but back then I cooked it like a European would, generally with dairy, which is fine, but the…
Basic Dryad Saddle / Pheasant Back Broth
After morel season as we get into summer, the pheasant back / dryad saddle / Cerioporus squamosus will still be out, not in the staggering numbers we see during the height of the late spring season, but still out and plentiful. They’re not spring mushrooms though, and finding tender, succulent ones is far more difficult…
